SpreadsheetGear vs. SyncFusion vs. ComponentOne

I conducted a three month analysis comparing three top spreadsheet controls for .NET application developers: SpreadsheetGear, SyncFusion Spreadsheet, and ComponentOne Spread.NET. The definite winner was SpreadsheetGear, with ComponentOne Spread.net in second. SpreadsheetGear provides the most Excel-like experience, is the most performant, and provides the most responsive and capable product support.

I build a reporting engine for my company and SpreadsheetGear made it awesome. Our customers have been very pleased. I wanted to share my extensive analysis with any other developers out there trying to find the right spreadsheet control for their .NET application.

 

Comparison

• Spreadsheet gear grid goes to 1 million! Wow. (SyncFusion goes to 500 by default, ComponentOne goes to 60k)
• SpreadsheetGear is an older control which has been around for a while. It is built by the same guys who built Formula1, so they have been doing spreadsheets for many years.
• SpreadsheetGear has a better keyboard/mouse experience than SyncFusion or ComponentOne. The grid is tuned to the Excel experience, for example copy down, shift down arrow, drag to fill-down series, etc.
• SpreadsheetGear supports 398 Excel formulas. SyncFusion supports 183. ComponentOne: ?
• Good printing support. SpreadsheetGear has built in print preview (which is more performant than SyncFusion)
• SyncFusion documentation and API comments are much better than ComponentOne.
• SyncFusion has a context menu on by default, ComponentOne does not.
• Support for Spreadsheet gear is much better than ComponentOne. ComponentOne gave me wrong answers on several occasions. I was able to email support directly and receive detailed answers with sample code same-day.
• The SpreadsheetGear control doesn't come with a ribbon control, but it does come with right click context menu, and dialogs which allow for sheet editing and formatting.
• Supports Exporting to Excel
• In SpreadsheetGear, Images are draggable. In ComponentOne and SyncFusion, the images are stuck in one spot.
• The icons, ribbon, and dialogs for ComponentOne and SyncFusion look more modern than SpreadsheetGear.
• Spreadsheet gear has impressive multithreaded support (GetLock(), ReleaseLock(), multi-core recalc and sorting and interruptible background recalc)
• SpreadsheetGear is able to open a spreadsheet in SpreadsheetGear control that is also currently open in Excel. SyncFusion throws an exception.
• SpreadsheetGear has formula bar, ComponentOne does not have formula bar.
• ComponentOne Spread.Net has different API between WinForms and WPF versions for some reason. Spreadsheet gear has the exact same API between the two.

 

Scalability and Performance

The scalability tests against SpreadsheetGear were impressive which is important for the large amount of data we need to handle. SyncFusion was throwing exceptions when we tried to insert more than 500 rows. ComponentOne was limited to 50k rows. SpreadsheetGear was orders of magnitude faster.

• Generate 1004 custom plot controls on SpreadSheet: 0.03 seconds (controls are virtualized until they become visible)
• Large table refresh with 55,000 rows: 6 seconds
• Successfully generated 2,584 page report to PDF using Amyuni PDF print driver resulting in a 70 megabyte file.

 

Cost

SpreadsheetGear	ComponentOne	SyncFusion
$999/developer volume discounts of 10% for 4 or more, 25% for 10 or more	$1200/developer	$1800/developer retail, $900/developer volume discount
Pricing Detail Includes year of support and product updates	Pricing Detail Enterprise suite of controls	Pricing Detail Entire enterprise suite of controls

Conclusion

My analysis was conducted September 2012 – December 2012. Note to be fair to SyncFusion, their Spreadsheet control is version 1. I ‘m sure it will get better. They offer a whole suite of controls including an awesome sample code browser (I like them better than Infragistics in many ways).

In conclusion, SpreadsheetGear is the hands down winner. We demoed our reporting engine built on SpreadsheetGear to our German Software team last week and they were quite impressed how much we had accomplished in so little time. We demoed the product to our customers and they are thrilled (no exaggeration here). I am happy to recommend SpreadsheetGear because they have done an outstanding job which blows the competition out of the water.

Joseph Fluckiger

Sr. Software Architect

Thermo Fisher Scientific

Austin, TX

 

SpreadsheetGear Screenshots

This is a screenshot of the reporting engine we built using SpreadsheetGear. Note that the ribbon is not included with spreadsheet gear. We used Infragistics WPF ribbon control in our application. And a Microsoft WPF Expander control for the left nav.

ComponentOne Spread.Net Screenshots

 

SyncFusion screenshots